Monday, March 05, 2007

Erotica vs. Porn

Like Laura, I've been bouncing around between free short stories the past few days. Two stories in particular caught and held my attention and have been niggling at my brain because of my completely different reactions to them.

The first story was one on Ally Blue's website, called "Jingle Bell Fuck" (obviously NOT one of the sweet shorts Laura directs us to!). A gay male threesome, it "began life as a bandslash fanfic," Blue writes and "all I did was change the names and the speech patterns to protect the innocent." Two men in a relationship invite a third in for some sexual escapades. The focus on the story is the sex between the three. Although there is a delightful twist at the end, the story did very little for me beyond my prurient interest in the sex. There's little focus on any relationship building or character development. And I'm sure that wasn't her purpose, either, but it left me...not cold, but kind of bored.

I've enjoyed Ally Blue's stories before, which is precisely why I was on her website. I own and loved Easy, a sweet story about a growing relationship between an ex-hooker and a closeted professional. The short "Nicky" is a bitter-sweet story about two lovers too set in their ways to be together permanently and "Happiness is a Warm Boy" is a wonderful story of hope and the beginning of a relationship. In fact, in Blue's long list of short stories, "Jingle Bell Fuck" seems to be an anomaly--most of the stories examine the growth of a relationship or the growth of at least one of the characters. "Jingle Bell Fuck" is just a fun sexy romp, and I probably shouldn't expect it to be more, but it seems I need more than that in my erotica.

Jules Jones has available on her website "A Trifling Affair", a 5500 word male/male erotic short that apparently also started its life as fan fiction. "This version," Jones writes, "has had the serial numbers filed off," which is to say that the characters are no longer specifically associated with the original show about which she was writing fan fiction.

I adored this story, not because it was hot m/m sex, my current obsession, but because, in 5500 words, Jones manages to reveal a complex relationship between the two colleagues. Darryl, used to topping during sex, used to taking charge no matter what, tries to seduce Colin but instead is so nervous that he drinks way too much. After a fire alarm, they go back to their room where Colin, not incapacitated from too much wine, seduces Darryl, topping him instead. As Darryl figures out after the encounter:

The bastard had deliberately sat back and watched while he'd made himself incapable! Why? It was a mean bloody trick to play on someone, it meant that he'd had to just lie there and take it, when he'd intended...

When he'd blithely intended to fuck Colin, without considering whether that was the way Colin liked sex.

Darryl apologizes for having made assumptions and Colin kisses his hand:

Message received and understood. Darryl shivered slightly, both from pleasure at the sensation of lips brushing his palm, and from wondering how receptive Colin would have been tomorrow night if he hadn't apologised.

While the sex is a nice bonus and is certainly hot, the focus of the story is on the emotional growth of the relationship. We read about two characters who are attracted to each other making the compromises necessary to come together in mutually agreeable and pleasurable ways.

To me, that is the essence of romance. And whether that romance has its foundation in a short, sweet, pure romance or in a hot, gay male menage, I'm not interested in reading either unless the story is based on character and relationship development.

This is why paranormal stories like Jory Strong's Spirits Shared do very little for me either. I loved the premise of the shapeshifting in the book and I enjoyed the multi-cultural aspects, and I bought it because it was a m/m/f book. The problem for me is that, as soon as the characters meet, they know they are meant for each other and the rest of the story is about the logistics of finding time to have sex, rather than the emotional path and relationship growth it takes to be attracted to a third and let that third into an already established relationship.

My "revelation" here is not a ground-breaking discovery. I think most romance readers would be able to articulate this requirement for character and relationship development in some way if asked why they enjoy romances. In fact, Bronwyn Clarke's blog does ask this question, and that's what most readers answered. I guess I'm just surprised that I find this self-imposed requirement even in my erotica reading. It's not all about the sexorating, as the Smart Bitches would say. It's still about what makes two (or three) people tick, what brings them together, what makes them work each other into their separate lives.

5 comments:

Successfully executing both story and character arc in a short story -- erotic or otherwise -- is an art form few can master. On Literotica, where I honed my chops, a plotless piece of sex prose is called "stroke" and serves one purpose only. If you're reading it for any other reason, you'll be dissatisfied. Stroke has its place, but it's not in the romance genre.

But I find that even the anthologies of "Best Erotica" follow this as well. They might not be romances with happy endings, but they've got the same character development or relationship development of the best romances and short romances. I've found that for me, the best stroke stories are still those that break some sort of taboo for one of the characters or give him/her some sort of growth, even if in the wrong direction. That gets me hotter than Tab A in Slot B.

This is one of the reasons for the use of the terms "stroke" and "literotica". It's a useful way to distinguish between two styles of erotica. You can also find "porn" and "erotica" being used the same way, but a good deal less often, as those terms have suffered rather badly from irregular conjugation -- "I write erotica, you write porn, she writes obscene filth."

When well-written, stroke can be very good indeed, but the primary aim is to get off fast and move on to the next story. It does take talent and effort to write good stroke. I've written it, but I'm not very good at it, because I want to know more about the characters. The stories in the "Best of" anthologies typically tend to the literotica end of the spectrum, in part because the intended audience likes a bit of plot in their smut.

What you can often get with converted fanfic is that a story that's literotica in its original form becomes stroke when you file off the serial numbers. The serial numbers are what gives you the relationship between the characters -- the author is to some extent relying on the reader's prior knowledge of the characters and situation. When you file off the serial numbers you have to replace that assumed backstory. Anna Genoese commented in a panel at a writers' workshop that as a rough rule of thumb the story will double in length by the time you've added in enough material to replace the serial numbers.

Over at Passionate Ink, the RWA chapter for erotic romance, we distinguish between "erotic romance" and "erotica."

In erotic romance, the story can be very graphic and include multiple partners or specific tastes such as BDSM, but MUST focus on the relationship of the partners and MUST have a HEA (happily ever after) ending.

Erotica on the other hand, while equally graphic, is more about the sexual journey of the protagonist/s and does not have to end in a HEA.

Those distinctions have worked nicely for our members in describing their manuscripts.